Funeral held for Native boys previously buried in the St. John’s cemetery over 130 years ago

John Parker and Joseph Roy, two boys from White Earth, were brought back early Sunday, Sept. 29, after being gone for over 130 years. Both had been buried in the St. John’s cemetery since their death at the St. John’s boarding school in the late 1800s.

Parker was given a traditional Ojibwe funeral, led by a procession of local motorcycle clubs, at the Naytahwaush Sports Center. Over 100 people gathered for the funeral, including next of kin to Parker, past and present members of the Initiative for Native Nation Relations (INNR), Prioress Sister Karen Rose, and CSB+SJU President Brian Bruess. Roy’s family held a private ceremony at the same time, and both were buried in a repatriation cemetery near Naytahwaush.

The effort to bring the boys home unofficially started in 2019 when White Earth Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Jamie Arsenault visited St. John’s for the first time. Her questions for the school extended to her visiting the St. John’s cemetery with CSB+SJU professor and Director for the Initiative for Native Nation Relations Ted Gordon.

The Record reached out for comment, and Arsenault had not responded by the time of publication.

“One of the places that I took her was to the cemetery, and she said that someday, the families and communities might want these boys to come home. That was when I first became aware that this was a possibility, but there was a lot of work to do to connect these people,” Gordon said.

This conversation followed into 2021, when Joseph LaGarde, founder and executive director of the Niibi Center for the Rights of Nature, a White Earth-based non-profit, visited the cemetery. He saw the headstone for Parker and recognized him as a possible relative. Around the same time, Gordon worked with Arsenault through a community engaged learning project for his Honors 3 course. One of the course’s projects included having students transcribe a ledger of the boarding school children’s names and compare them to names in the Abbey Cemetery.

Gordon shared his findings with the Historic Preservation Office, and a more detailed search followed. It was through this effort that LeGarde learned he was next of kin to Parker. This past summer, both the Tribal Council and the families made the decision to bring the two boys home.

“The only other place in North America where there have been boarding school children disinterred and returned home… was at the Carlisle Indian School… and it was the army leading those efforts. This is the first non-military institution [doing this work],” Gordon said.

There are only three schools in the country that exist today that are adjacent to or overlap spaces where Native American boarding schools operated. Those schools are the College of St. Benedict, St. John’s University, and the University of Minnesota Morris.

These campuses are part of the bigger story of Native American boarding schools.

In Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the first Indian boarding school was founded in 1879 by Richard Pratt, who infamously said, “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that… has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.” This was the goal of these schools.

Beginning in the 1880s, Congress passed a series of laws requiring Native children to be sent to boarding schools to force assimilation through family separation. The St. John’s Industrial School, operated by the St. John’s Abbey, was one of hundreds of these schools nationwide. The school was open from 1884-1896, the same time period that the St. Benedict’s Monastery operated the St. Benedict’s Industrial School, another Native American boarding school. The St. John’s Abbey and the St. Benedict’s Monastery also operated mission-based Native American boarding schools on the White Earth and Red Lake reservations from the late 1800s through the 1940s. When asked for comment, the St. John’s Abbey responded that their perspective on this history is included in the Fall 2024 issue of the Abbey Banner, which includes the articles, “When Good Intentions Go Awry” and “St. John’s Boarding School.”

“The detrimental effects of the boarding school and schools on the reservations are sad chapters of the St. John’s legacy that require acknowledgement, apology, some repatriation and compensatory efforts going forward,” Brother Aaron Raverty wrote.

The work pertaining to the St. John’s and St. Ben’s boarding schools’ history and repatriation efforts for White Earth and Red Lake is part of a larger effort of INNR.

“The mission of INNR is to take on services and research projects at the request of tribes, and to do so in a way that serves tribes on their own terms, while providing high impact practices for St. Ben’s and St. John’s students,” Gordon said.

This ranges from wild rice research—an effort to get wild rice sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places—to economic research looking at access to banking on reservations. Additionally, INNR received a Cultural Heritage Grant earlier this year focused on archival research, oral testimonies and developing curriculum from the archival and oral material for the White Earth Nation and K-12 schools on the legacies of Native American boarding schools.

“A long-term goal of ours is for every department on campus to have some way in which they could be collaborating with Tribes,” Gordon said.

To provide more information on the boys’ return home and the work behind it, past CSB+SJU alumni who started this work and broader conversation on these topics INNR is hosting an event on Tuesday Oct. 29 at 7 p.m. in Quad 246: “Journey to Justice: Indigenous Partnerships at CSB+SJU.” Additionally, on Saturday, Nov. 2, Apollo High School is hosting the annual powwow, which all are invited to attend. These events solidify a commitment CSB+SJU has to their Native nation neighbors.

“There’s no shortage of talent on reservations. What there is a shortage of is resources. And as a liberal arts college, our strengths include the diversity of fields that our faculty and student have expertise in… one of [our] goals is to match the Tribes’ own goals…with resources we have to help them achieve their goals,” Gordon said.